Over at openp2pdesign.org, designer Massimo Menichinelli has written up some suggestions for starting a new Fab Lab:

…the machines are not the most important feature of lab: instead, it is more about the people behind it. People with a wrong and rigid attitude or without the required knowledge and expertise can be critical for the lab, so it is always a good thing to invest resources in choosing the right people and make them learn how to run the lab.

It’s all good advice and applicable to Makerspaces or Hackerspaces or whatever you have.

One thing I brought away from last week’s Make a Makerspace conference at the Artisan’s Asylum is that there’s more than one way to do it, as Peter Uithoven from the great Fablab Amersfoort points out. He points to their own Grassroots Fab Lab Instructable, which is equally good reading.